Cloud Raiders review: a cross-platform competitor for Clash of Clans

Looking for an alternative to Clash of Clans? Android offers several fine multiplayer raiding games/clones to choose from, including Castle Clash, Galaxy Siege, Total Conquest, and more. But the Clash-like game that has won my heart is Cloud Raiders from Game Insight.

Cloud Raiders offers a lot of polish (though Clash is still smoother), including AI battles, clan support and chat, and a very simple and fair in-app purchase system. It also boasts one feature that its competitors do not: unparalleled cross-platform support. You can play Cloud Raiders on Android alongside players from iOS, Windows Phone, Facebook, and (soon) Windows 8. Very cool, but how does it play? Find out in our detailed review with video!

Sky pirates

At the start of the game, the player’s airship falls prey to an attack from rival sky pirates. It quickly crashes, stranding the crew on one of the fantasy world’s many floating islands. The team will have to build a base in order to keep those pirates at bay, and take back some loot in the process. Incidentally, the clouds should really be on a separate parallax layer than the islands themselves.

Your base centers around a building called the Stronghold. This building determines what buildings and items are available to you and how far you can upgrade your existing buildings. You’ll want to upgrade it at every opportunity since it directly impacts your offensive and defensive capabilities. At the moment, the Stronghold maxes out at level 6. The game teases several units and items that can’t be built just yet – not until Game Insight raises the Stronghold level limit.

Defend the base

To defend your island, you’re going to need guns and arrows. Well, cannons and crossbows to be specific. Placing these types of turrets wisely requires some trial and error. Each one has a certain radius and might be stronger against some enemies than others. One turret only attacks aerial enemies, which 99 percent of players don’t use so it’s practically worthless. I think Game Insight plans to add another type of aerial unit in the future, which might make them more prevalent.

AI raiding parties will attack your base intermittently, but luckily those attacks only begin with your say so. Human players on the other hand will attack several times a day. Depending on how successful they are, they could come away with lots of the gold and clouds you’ve accumulated. Stand up to player attacks sufficiently well and your rank will increase; lose and it drops down a hair.

Building walls also plays a huge role in base defense. Walls cost lots of gold to build, and can be upgraded several times for increasingly steep prices. The overall idea is to protect your Stronghold and coin and cloud reserves sufficiently with walls, which slow nearly every enemy unit down. Meanwhile your turrets will pick off the invaders, hopefully before those baddies get to the good stuff. Base layout really offers a wide array of strategic possibilities.

Raiding parties

The real fun in Cloud Raiders is attacking other players’ islands. Each time you go out on an attack, you’ll bring an army of units. These include infantry, archers, strong guys, bomb dudes who blows up walls, and a few more types. Each costs a certain amount of clouds to create, takes up a different amount of space in your attacking team, and prioritizes specific targets. A few of the units can be upgraded eventually, but (annoyingly) not all of them.

The game automatically matches you against an opponent. You get fifteen seconds or so to study the rival player’s base and decide whether to attack it or not. If you the recommended target looks too tough or (more likely) has too little gold to be worth the effort, you can spend a little gold to re-roll… and re-roll… and re-roll. The matchmaking could be a lot better. My vote is to let players prioritize gold, clouds, or valor (PvP points) in order to cut back on the repeated searches for decent targets.

Having settled on an opponent, it’s time to deploy your units! Players don’t directly control their units in this game, which might make you think the battles lack strategy or are too hands-off. But in truth, the choice of where and when to deploy each unit plays a big part in winning the battle. Knowing what your units will attack and providing them with proper support can make all the difference.

After returning from battle with the resources you’ve stolen, your units will be exhausted. Rebuilding a raiding party can take up to 30 minutes depending on the level of your buildings and the size of the raiding party. The wait can be tiresome, but games like this want you coming back throughout the day.

Coins, clouds, and gems

Players will mine and steal two types of soft currencies: coins and clouds. Coins are mostly used for building and upgrading defensive buildings and walls. Clouds pay for unit production, some non-defensive buildings, and clearing away obstacles from your island. Eventually clouds will pile up while players constantly scrounge for gold; the two currencies don’t have a perfect balance.

The premium currency is gems. Although completing missions (such as clearing away obstacles and upgrading specific buildings) rewards players with gems, you can also choose to buy them with real money.

Like with most free to play games, gems can be used to speed up building times and other processes like unit production. Speeding up unit production can be especially useful since it lets you attack other players and steal their gold faster. If you’re trying not to spend much, speeding up stuff probably isn’t the way to go.

On the other hand, Cloud Raiders is one of the most fairly monetized free to play games I’ve come across. In almost every way, not buying gems won’t put you at a disadvantage. The one and only aspect in which ponying up is strongly encouraged would be builders.

See, you can only upgrade one building or structure at a time by default. These things take minutes, hours, or days to complete on their own. A second builder costs 500 gems – five bucks, basically. Additional builders get more expensive after that. But if you get into Cloud Raiders and seriously dig the gameplay, buying that second builder is practically a necessity. And that’s fair, to pitch in a little something if you like a game and plan to continue playing it for very long.

Clans and cross-platform

Being inspired by Clash of Clans, Cloud Raiders has full clan support. Right now, joining a clan lets you share units with other clan members (so you can take more units into battle than someone with no clan) and engage in asynchronous clan chat (global chat is coming soon). Clans have their own leaderboard rankings, providing an extra level of competition to the game.

Clans and all of Cloud Raiders’ features are cross-platform compatible thanks to the magic of the cloud. Players can jump back and forth between Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Facebook, and eventually Windows 8 - all without losing any progress. The freedom from platforms has created a significant player base that several competing games can’t match.

A worthwhile alternative

Although Cloud Raiders has a bit of a single-player campaign, there’s no real story to it and you’ll eventually run out of campaign raids to complete. The real meat of the game is raiding other players over and over – hence the game requiring an online connection.

If you’re a competitive player with a mind for strategy, you’ll love endlessly raiding hapless (and not so hapless) bases. Of course, Clash of Clans does most of the same things as this one. But if you use multiple platforms or want to play with friends on other systems, Cloud Raiders is the easy choice to make.

Reader comments

Cloud Raiders review: a cross-platform competitor for Clash of Clans

I have been playing about about a month now. Fun little Strategy game. I am currently stuck at the level caps for about 90% of my buildings. So I hope they allow more levels soon. I sometimes get frustrated at my units attack strategy, particularly around what walls to attack. For example two wall pieces next to each other might a potential target. The units will not pick the wall with the lowest HP to attack. So I can damage a wall down to 1 HP and the dumb unit will instead go hit away at the full HP wall next to it. That is frustrating.

Also I didn't bother getting the 3rd builder. I have earned more than enough gems to do so by completing in game assignments (attack play, clear space, raise army etc...) and instead used the gems to speed up buildings at times.

Tried it and it shows great promise but like many of the really good copy cats it falls short. Castle Clash had a lot going for it, lots of diversity, things to do, etc but there was hardly anyone online to play with or against. Galaxy Factions has tremendous polish and offers a lot but again, hardly anyone online and the developer is very slow to issue updates.
Cloud Raiders suffers the same fate and worse, it's balance in game play is terrible. Many examples are with building upgrades and jump from say 100k for a level five to all of a sudden to 1 million for a level six. CR also makes it so you can't upgrade troops until higher levels which is counter intuitive in that after awhile you cant raid anymore with low level troops to get the money to actually upgrade to get better troops. CR's unbalance is the worst out of any of them I've played.

Castle Clash has gotten a lot better. They have continued adding features over the past several months. I started playing almost a year ago, and actually stopped at one point, but eventually gave it another chance. They have since added Here Be Monsters, which allows your base to defend against waves of heroes and troops allowing for big rewards and experience; Guilds, which currently includes Boss Battles that allow your whole guild to take down a powerful boss; and just today, they also added Quests and Hero Trials. Hero Trials are similar to Here Be Monsters, but you defend against a single wave of heroes. Quests are random, but allow you to complete random in-game tasks to receive rewards. Sometime soon, they are supposed to be releasing a new update that will add Guild Wars, a chance to team up and battle other guilds! It looks really promising.

Overall, they have done a decent job at keeping things fresh, compared to what I've seen from a lot of similarly styled games.

Yeah, I spend entirely too much time playing it, haha! I even got my son playing it, now. We are both in the same guild. Our guild is pretty laid back, so we have a lot of fun. We're all really anxious to get out there and start battling other guilds though!

Game "was" fun, but since the last December update, which killed farming & made finding loot an unbearably, tedious grind, Clash of Clans is a complete and utter disappointment to millions of players. Many quit, but many grind on hoping Supercell will come to their senses. Personally, I doubt they will. Some players don't care, especially the rich kids/adults who pour money into the game like gas into a gas guzzling lemon. "Grinding? Heck no! Just pour more money into the game" mentality. And as long as Supercell can suck off the money ***** of these whales, they couldn't care less about the millions they disappointed. That's "Greed-atude" for ya!